Russia set to boost North Korea's power supplies

Page Tools

Russia is moving to become a main supplier of electricity and gas to North Korea.

This comes as the supply of non-nuclear energy sources available to the impoverished country emerges as a key bargaining chip in talks aimed at defusing North Korea's nuclear weapons program.

"We are building energy transmission lines to the North Korean border," said Sergei Darkin, governor of Russia's Pacific Maritime region.

Mr Darkin said that if Russia's President Vladimir Putin "gives us the task of transmitting energy to North Korea next year, we will be ready to do that."

North Korean negotiators said at recent talks in Beijing that one price for freezing their nuclear-bomb program would be obtaining fuel supplies from other countries to provide 2 million kilowatts of power a year.

That is roughly the output that was expected from the two nuclear reactors that were to be built under the 1994 international accord aimed at ending North Korea's nuclear weapons program.

AdvertisementAdvertisement

Although South Korea spent more than $A1 billion on the initial construction of the power plants, the program was frozen 18 months ago after North Korea ended international monitoring of nuclear materials that could be processed into bomb-grade material.

What is behind North Korea's demands for power is a shortage that has contributed to the nation's industrial collapse.

Mr Darkin said Russia was completing plans to export excess electricity from Russian hydro-electric dams to the Korean peninsula, sending power also through North Korea to South Korea.

Sceptics say such a project would enable North Korea to turn off lights in South Korea. But supporters say North Korea would become dependent on the arrangement and moderate its behaviour.

At a conference last month to discuss energy-sharing between Russia and the Korean peninsula, North Korean officials agreed to provide basic data by next month on its electric power system to the Korea Electrotechnology Research Institute, a South Korean government research group.

Separately, Russian and Korean energy planners are studying routes for a Korean peninsula extension to a natural gas pipeline now under construction to Khabarovsk from huge gas deposits off the Pacific coast of Russia's Sakhalin Island.

A 3000 kilometre pipeline from these reserves to the South Korean capital, Seoul, would take four years to build and would cost up to $4.9 billion, said Selig Harrison, a Korea expert at the Centre for International Policy in Washington.

North Korean officials strongly favoured building this line, said Mr Harrison, who had extensive meetings with North Korean officials in Pyongyang, the capital, in April.